At some point I decided to make my own pixel website instead of just collecting other people's graphics, and thus, "Lucid-Dreams Pixel Heaven" was born. Check out the incredible layout that I made for it (click the thumbnail if you'd like to get a closer look at it in all its glory):
After a while of dragging and dropping Piczo fun, I decided to try to learn to code and made a simple site on Freewebs. I eventually dropped the cheesy "Pixel Heaven" from the name and entitled it "Lucid-Dreams" (the hyphen was important for some reason but I forget why). The layout I had up on my freewebs site was even worse than my Piczo one and featured badly drawn chocolate bars with faces. And my coding was terrible and the iframe would migrate across the page depending on your browser/screen resolution.
A little while later and after more practise (and a lot of help) with coding, a good friend, Eve offered to host my website on her domain, sugar-melody.net. And when that domain expired, another good friend, Jenny hosted Lucid-Dreams on her domain, wishable.net. The layouts I had up while hosted by them featured my pixeled fanart of my favourite character at the time, Tatty Teddy by Carte Blanch Greetings. I really enjoyed being hosted by them and they gave me a lot of support and help over the years.
Eve and Jenny's 32x32 buttons
I took a break from pixeling for a year or so, and then in 2008 I bought my own domain, catch-a-star.net. Unfortunately the domain only lasted for three years before it expired; I'd been bored of pixeling and inactive for a while so when the time came to renew it I bought game currency instead. I soon started to miss owning my own website though, and ended up sadly staring at it on the wayback machine every now and then, until 2013 when my lovely friend,
Joanna offered to host Catch a Star on her domain, pausedlife.com. I rescued my files from the good old wayback machine, and I've been happily hosted by Joanna ever since. For a long time I kept my old layout from catch-a-star.net:
I loved the colour scheme of that layout, I'd made little matching titles for every page, I had rollover effects so the navigation stars would light up when you hovered over them and thought it looked really cute. But the layout itself was a bit of an embarrassment, it was plain and the bunnies were badly shaded. After getting bored of pixeling for a couple more years and then returning in 2017, I decided to make a new layout. Cazville took a while to make, my coding is still pretty terrible, and the perspective on the buildings and whatnot is kinda messed up, but I'm really happy with it.
Unfortunately our little pixel website community was pretty much gone by 2015, most people seem to use things like Tumblr and DeviantArt to display their art rather than making personal websites now. It was really fun while it lasted, and a nice friendly place to escape to and I'll always remember it and all of the lovely people I met through it. There are still a few kawaii-style pixel websites around though, you can find some of them on my
Links Out page.
